Three weeks and a little bit into the role as Online Communities Editor with Media Wales and we’ve only gone and launched a community website for Cardiff.

We’re taking a bit of a risk, developing as we go along and hopefully building a community around the yourCardiff website. I’m hoping that by being open during the development stage we get people chipping in, suggesting ideas and feeling like it’s their site too – rather than just being developed some suits in an office.

This does however mean we’ve got a few gaping holes, some bits that say ‘under development’ and no doubt some parts that don’t display properly in Internet Explorer or some obscure browser.

But, it’s a win. We’ve hit the ground running, we’re building from the bottom up and hopefully creating a site that Cardiff can be proud of. It’s about the little things, celebrating what happens in communities (both location and interest wise) across the capital city of Wales.

We’ll no doubt have some fallings out, some disputes and some triumphs but I’m sure it’ll be fun along the way as we try to break our content down into hyper-local chunks – putting news and information into the hands of people in Cardiff. Sounds dangerous, it could be. Sounds ambitious, it is.

We’ll be using social media to help build our community, but it’s also about getting out of the office, out of the media hub and sticking our camera or pen and paper, into different places to find out what’s going on.

As I saw posted on a rather visceral blog post the other week – hyper-local is nothing new. It’s doing what local news organisations do best, tell people what’s going on in their area and community (be that location or subject of interest) but the web just opens up new opportunities and ways of doing that.

And finally, a huge thank you to unclewilco (Andrew Wilcox) for his break-neck development over the last few weeks. There’s much more to come.

Image credit to Auntie P

In January 2009 I decided as a new year’s resolution to set up a blog for where I live. Inspired by St Albans Blog, run by Robin Hamman, I boldy registered Preston Blog. I decided to go with a wordpress.com account as I wasn’t sure how much time I could commit and I was also a little short of cash so a domain and hosting were out of the question.

Since January 2009 I’ve been amazed at what the blog has achieved. It’s now just a few unique visitors away from having 10,000 in three months. No mean feat for something that I try to update as and when.

What’s the point in having a community journalism blog for Preston, Lancashire? Well, simple really: people want it. The sheer number of emails I’ve had and twitter messages saying “thanks for the blog/post, keep it up”.

I thought I’d take the chance, just over three months on since launch, to reflect on how the blog is going and pass on some advice for anyone thinking of doing something similar for where they live.

It will take up your time, a lot of your time

I started off just posting here and there. I thought no one would read what I wrote, then I saw the stats. 100 unique visitors a day, holy shit, people are reading what I write and they are commenting too. I started pulling hours getting content. You need to be prepared for the commitment of it, for talking about it, going to random events, getting lost down dead-end roads because Google Maps told you that’s where the venue was.

You will get involved in your community

People love publicity, they like to let you know they are doing stuff. Make sure you’ve got your optimistic people-loving mindset on as you’ll meet some weird, amazing and wonderful people. I’ve already met a Subbuteo enthusiast, a man who loves Open Street Maps and a bunch of rather kooky authors at a live literature night. But I love that, I love the diversity of it all.

Twitter is your friend

Twitter has been brilliant. Without it then I don’t think I’d have found half of the content I currently have on my blog. I post all my content to it, I thank guest writers, I debate things with people. Twitter is my living breathing news feed from the people of Preston. I use a great little application called Twitter Local, or the ’stalking thing’ as it was referred to by my ex-girlfriend, to find anyone who is twittering in Preston, Lancashire. I follow them to see what they are saying, and if they like what I’m about they can follow me back.

Other people will write far better than you

I have a wide and far-reaching network of guest writers. They are great and without them the blog wouldn’t work. I have someone who is an expert on the built environment, so whenever there’s a story about a ‘new development’ in Preston he knows what is actually going on. I have students climbing over each other to write stuff and get it in their published portfolios, although whether I’m a ‘real’ media outlet will be up to their tutors to decide. I want the blog to be a variety of voices writing about what they are passionate about, people will always read passionate writing. It’d be boring if it was just me all the time. One of the best and most viewed pages on the blog is ‘Get Involved‘. I count getting involved as anything from subscribing by RSS, commenting on a post to writing a guest post.

Look online and you will find

I’ve found some great content on Flickr, I have a feed of photos that comes in and is updated nearly daily with people snapping ‘Preston’ on flickr. Some of the shots are incredible. I don’t need a photo crew, I’ve got a whole photo community. The same with video, there’s plenty out there.

Don’t just sit online

Because my phone bill would be huge, I have to get off my laptop and go and speak to people. I phone people and arrange to meet them face-to-face. It’s great, the interview is so much better and you learn so much more about what’s going on. Preston Blog also inspired the Preston Tweetup that was fantastic. Just over 40 people came together, with a live-twitter feed, and discussed how the web could be used for Preston Guild in 2012. Local council’s should be doing this stuff, but they don’t, so we will instead. The ideas were ace, the people were ace and we’ll do it again sometime soon. But it was offline, it was great publicity for the blog and it made for some great content.

There’s a few thoughts about the blog and how it’s gone. I’m enjoying it and now it’s the time to get serious with it. The local newspaper has no rival, and it’s getting a bit lazy. Preston Blog has shown there is a demand for quality, local, community reporting. Preston has no newspaper, and I’d never open a newspaper, but it can have a great and virbant community journalism resource.

Over the coming months we’ll hopefully be shifting Preston Blog to a domain name, getting a new design with a proper Wordpress template. We’ll be bidding for some funding, registering as a nonprofit, and building some great content. We’ve got plans to live-cover some events over the summer, with full multimedia coverage. But, although we’ll get bigger, we will never forget what the blog is about. It’s about Preston, it’s about the people that live there, the places you can go, the things you can do, and the stories that it all holds.

Thank you to everyone who has read, writter for, commented on, twittered about or spoken about Preston Blog. We appreciate your support.

Speaker 1: The story so far: Charity websites & the email – the good, the bad and just don’t go there!

The day kicked off with Howard Lake from UK Fundraising taking a look at where the third sector currently stood in relation to using the web. Howard was a great speaker, opening up the subject and explaining the basics of things such as RSS, web design, where to place your donate button.

From a Union perspective it was great that we are already doing a lot of what he talked about, but it was great to be refreshed about the basics and to remember what we should be doing on a web 1.0 level before trying to run on the web 2.0 level.

There’s a few things I’m going to put into practice on our site. The first is to instead of having a ‘donate now’ button on every page to re-focus the site to have a ‘get involved’ button on every page that allows students to quickly find out how they can get involved in the Union.

Speaker 2: Developing your online fundraising – the opportunities to be used

There was a shuffle around to the programme as Jonathan Waddingham took to the stage from Justgiving. Unfortunately Nick from Mission Fish hadn’t tuned up for this slot (or as we learned later, he wasn’t actually due until the afternoon) so Jon was bumped up the programme! He gave a great presentation that showed the huge increase in community fundraising seen on Justgiving over the past 12 months.

Jon also spoke about the success of their Facebook application that allows users to plug it into their profile and use it to help reach their total. This was a really clever idea, allowing features such as a little bar that sits on your profile and shows how much of the total has been raised so far and most important how your friends can help YOU reach the total.

From a Union perspective I think there’s a lot more that the organisation can do to support students in their personal fundraising exploits. We could point them in the direction of great tools such as the Justgiving facebook application, show them how to use the web to fundraise and explain about using secure tools such as Justgiving and Bmycharity.

You can watch Jon’s presentation here:

Justgiving’s Jonathan Waddingham talking in York! from Justgiving on Vimeo.

Speaker 3 – Web 2.0 – where are we heading? An introduction to social media

I consider myself to know a fair bit about social media (blogs, twitter, facebook etc) but it’s always good to be reminded of their power and what they can achieve. Steve Bridger took to the stage and with a very flashy presentation (he uses a mac, so no powerpoint here!) he really opened everyone’s eyes to what social media can achieve for nonprofit organisations.

Steve opened by re-telling his days as a campaigner for Oxfam and as a student. He pulled out his ‘telephone tree’, now I’m far too young to remember one of these but apparently they were all the rage during the 80s for student activists. Remarkably though they are very similar to Facebook, you have a number of connections that you ‘touch base’ with regularly. Just with Facebook it’s easier, quicker, cheaper and the number of connections can be much larger. This demonstrated the reach that social media can give charities.

We were then shown how a blog can be a powerful, and fast-moving, vehicle for change. Steve showed us After Wilma, a blog he setup to help cover the devestating of Hurricane Wilma in Mexico. The tourism board didn’t want people to see what was happening, it was ‘business as usual’ according to the tourism board. The blog combined user generated content, images, blogs, videos and reports to showcase what was happening.

Flickr and Twitter were shown to the audience next and Flickr in particular was a very effective way of showing what the charity can do. Steve was really hammering home that charities can use social media to tell their stories. Flickr in particular is a great way to tell stories, as images are far more powerful than reams of text.

The key point that I picked out from Steve’s presentation was when he said “social media is messy, that’s just the way it is”. This is really true. You can plan and create strategy after strategy for social media but the best way is to just do it! And it will be messy, difficult, tricky but also brilliant, engaging and connecting.

Speaker 4 – The power of social networks for online fundraising

We were joined live via web link by Beth Kanter from San Francisco. The connection wasn’t brilliant so I couldn’t hear some of what Beth said but she gave an overview of how she’d used social media to raise money.

She’d used blogs and twitter mainly to raise money and awareness for various causes. I think the figure was something like $210,000 from just online fundraising. Imagine how cheap it must have been to do, not in terms of time, but in terms of overheads, no print/paper costs. I think Beth’s brief web chat showed how social media can be used to make a real tangible difference.

Speaker 5 – A case study – Dogs Trust

The next session was a real eye-opener. Dogs Trust took to the stage and after all the theory we’d heard and examples, they showed us how they had used social media to create a community and also achieve their goal – to re-home dogs.

They’d used Facebook to create a network where they had 35,000 fans (that’s the equivalent of the Union’s membership) and this gives them a base to push out messages to those fans and get them involved. Not content with being on Facebook the Dogs Trust showed off DoggySnaps – summed up as Facebook for dogs. This is a brilliant idea and they’ve created a network for dog owners to show off their pets, connect with each other and the Dogs Trust sell advertising off the back of it to fund it.

Their use of twitter was also eye-opening. They had a full-time staff presence who looked after their social media presences and being on twitter was an important part of it. They gave an example of how they’d managed to re-home a dog through twitter, and just being there to respond to people was important.

This got me thinking about how the Union can use twitter. We have an account but don’t actively use it to engage with our membership (don’t know how many of our membership are active on it, but students tend to be early-adopters!). The key for using twitter seems to be to engage people by asking questions and be a ‘real person’ where possible on twitter – not just an automated post/response drone.

Speaker 6 – eBay for charity: buzz-building, special auctions and social networks

Nick Aldridge from MissionFish had arrived after the programme cock-up took to the stage to explain how eBay and MissionFish could be an excellent way for charities to raise money.

He also appeared to sound a note of caution about social media and the web, and rightly so. While the numbers with social media appear big and impressive, they are still a small % of a charities audience and potential donors. It’s easy to get carried away with new media and forget that 3 million odd people still read The Sun every day! However, something that starts online/social media can often help lead to ‘old media’ coverage because the old guard like anything that is new – hence why Twestival got very good coverage.

Nick also went through five key trends about online fundraising that he’d picked out during a joint research exercise with the Institute of Fundraising:

1. Stories, not annual reports
2. Engage and explain, then fundraise
3. From walled garden to public park, beyond your own website
4. Integrate the online work to fit your overall message
5. Use partners to reach new audiences

Speaker 7 – To blog or not to blog? That is the question

Chris Garrett rounded off the day with a top session about blogging. He got a little sidetracked when speaking about twitter, but it was great that he put his twitter screen up and talked everyone through what it actually was and what it could do.

He had a great little summary of why charities should blog:

attract, inform, interact, retain, energise, recruit

That hit the nail on the head. Great stuff. He also spoke a little about SEO and explained how using a content management system such as wordpress, or anything with tags, makes your web presences infinitely more findable by Google and other search engines.

Summing up

Overall it was a great day and while some of it was stuff I already knew, there were some fantastic examples of how social media and the web can be used. The main idea I came away with was that the Union can use the web to engage students a lot more and connect them with opportunities and ideas that they want to be involved with.

Credit has to go to Graham Richards from the Institute of Fundraising North for his excellent organisation of the event and for being adventurous with twitter to find speakers!

personal branding

This month’s topic over on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists is an interesting one and one that I voted for in our very democratic way of deciding December’s topic. What have you done to build your brand online?

See where you are online

The first thing I did was go and see what is out there about me on the internet. A quick Google of my name ‘ed walker’ made me realise first of all: a) I have a really common name b) There’s a ‘Sir Edward Walker’ – not me. Having a common name is the first hurdle in building a brand online, because if you’re called Japhael Jiminez – chances are you’re pretty unique.

Start a blog

Starting a blog is a must. This should be the core of your brand online. This is where you live and breath online. If possible try and buy your own domain and a bit of hosting, as having your name as a yourname.com/.co.uk/.net will help massively when it comes to boosting yourself up those all important Google rankings. After starting your blog and making it look pretty, get posting. Post about stuff that matters to you, it’ll probably matter to other people. Your blog should be your living CV, blog about stuff you’re working on, your success’ and even some of your failures. Make sure you’ve got an ace ‘About’ page, so that if people want to know more about you they can find out.

Link to people

You’re not going to build this brand alone. When posting on your blog, link out and link far and wide. If you link to people, they will probably come and look at your blog and see who you are. They might even link back if they like your stuff!

Have a good presence on LinkedIn

Forget Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc, LinkedIn is the professional networking site and it can be used by potential employers to find you and see who you are and what you do. Ensure your profile is fully filled out, keep it updated reguarly and you’ll be surprised how much traffic it can bring to your blog and also how highly LinkedIn profiles rank in Google and other search engines.

Claim your blog on Technorati

Technorati is the bloggers website. It’s important to claim your blog as this will tell you who is linking to you and give you an authority ranking. As more people link to you, your authority grows.

Listen to those who know

I suggest people like Chris Brogan and Adam Singer, who aren’t journalists, but have built up highly successful blogs and follows online. They have built a brand around themselves online, and as a result have benefitted financially but also in building up a big and useful network of contacts.

Network offline and transfer online

Face to face is still and always will be the most powerful communication tool in the world. Make use of it, at a networking event? At a party? Social media is reasonably in right now and while it may not be the best conversation starter it’s a great conversation finisher. Make sure you leave people you’ve been speaking to with your blog address, or if you’re a guest speaker make sure it’s on your slides.

Twitter and other social media

Make sure you’re using social media such as Twitter to join in the conversation, find and follow relevant people. Give people a reason to follow you by posting regularly and by posting interesting links to Twitter. Don’t tell us what you had for breakfast, that’s what Facebook status updates are for. Make sure all your social media presences link to your blog and that your blog links to all your social media presences. Think of your blog as the continent with lots of little islands around it.

Join relevant networks (like TNTJ!) and get networked

If there’s a network for your industry, join it and meet people. You’ll be surprised how interested they’ll be in what you do and what you may be blogging about.

Image in this post is used under creative commons from flickr user See-Ming Lee

• How to stand out in a world of infite choice

Some inspirational words from Adam Singer. He makes sense, there is a LOT out there on the web but knowing your niche is important.

• Facebook marketing strategies

Not as expensive as I thought, but are they effective? Interesting post.

• pluto-online

UCLan’s student newspaper gets a re-launch, two years after we first launched it. Good stuff, it’s going to be a great little site once it gets filled out with content.

He’s right, everything needs to be accessible and the old barriers within business’ need to disappear or it will be the business’ themselves who disappear. The very nature of the web is to share, I’m writing this blog post now and I’m sharing something with you. Someone tags this in delicious and shares it with their network, someone else emails it to a friend. It’s easy to share online.

That’s why it’s important that organisations, even the smaller ones like I work for, get their house in order and get everyone sharing. The flow of information around an organisation is almost as important as the flow of information from the organisation. I work for an organisation, a Students’ Union, who are a very sharing and caring kind of organisation, but there has to be a putting aside of old issues and a realisation that if the organisation is to move forward then information, best practice and most importantly ideas are not discussed behind closed doors but are passed around to be added to, taken away and made better.

While people hide behind job titles, department names and bottom lines then nothing will move forward. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, if you’re not sharing with your colleagues ideas then things won’t happen. For public organisations there are definitely loads of ideas floating around about how to make things better, how to improve what’s already there – I’ve had many of them while developing the Union’s new website – but they never go anywhere other than into a pad to be thought about next year. What if that pad was online? You scribble a note, and everyone can see it an contribute. The staff intranet shouldn’t be a boring list of when the next fire inspection is, it should be a buzzing community of everyone having their say about the next big idea.

And if there’s not enough people to fulfil all the ideas, as inevitably with public organisations there aren’t, then share them with others. You’re not in competition, you’re all working towards a common goal. As Chris Brogan says:

Sharing is a new business tool. And it’s not really obvious. You have to think about the ways you can share, the ways you can’t. You have to weigh whether you’re giving away the best part, or if there’s plenty to go around (so often, the answer is B).

So there we go, how is this sharing going to happen? If the people at the top see the possibilities that social media can have the opportunities for innovation that are bubbling underneath them.

I’ve recently finished No Logo by Naomi Klein. It’s described as ‘The Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement’ by The Guardian. In it Klein exposes the child labour violations of corporations, such as Nike, and makes you realise how quickly corporations have taken over the public space. She also spent a lot of the book focussing on the activism of consumers in the face of the ever expanding corporate sphere. It was inspiring to read the stories of those in the mid/to late 90s who fought back against the branding of their lives.

Klein ended the book on a rather sombre note. Yes a new global movement seemed to be forming, and after the Seattle riots following the World Trade Organisation summit then there really was a change in the air – but the attacks on September 11 2001 changed so much. That one event seemed to change the way that activism was taking place and changed the public perception towards the protestors – “You’re either with us, or against us” is the rhetoric that George W Bush spilled out. Johann Hari in the New Statesman asks ‘Whatever happened to No Logo?’.

I was especially interested in how Klein referenced the internet in her book. It seemed that this explosion of activism against large corporations happened around the same time that internet take-up really took off (mid-late 90s). She states: “it is the Internet that has rapidly become the tool of choice for spreading information about multinationals around the globe.” Which made me think, Klein wrote this before the rise of big internet corporations, such as Google and Facebook. How easy would it be for activists to use these social media in their campaigns? Facebook relies on advertisers to keep itself going, if consumers were to revolt against a branded network space – what would happen?

But, also, with the explosion of broadband has their been an explosion in activism using the web? What examples are there of people using the web to network as citizens and turn that into a campaign? How are third sector organisations using the ‘online’ generation to affect change? I started my series on ‘How third sector organisations are using the web for campaigning’ and reading No Logo has inspired me to finish it. How are these social media, that by their very nature are there to connect people, being used to connect and affect change?

So, to kick things off I’m looking at Action Aid. As their website header proudly states they’ve been fighting poverty for 35 years – but how is the web playing a role in fighting poverty?

The key to any successful campaign is PEOPLE, people and MORE people. People feel, have rights and have time/effort/energy. Many hands make light work and all that. Well, on the frontpage of Action Aid’s site – perhaps not as prominently as it could be – is ‘MyActionAid‘. This is hosted on a separate URL so can be promoted offline. This is a social network for activists.

Social networks and media should be great for charity. They allow the creation of social networks around specific topics, and for Action Aid they’ve taken this to a higher level by hosting and creating their own network. I can’t get access to it, as I’m not a member, but this rather funky (E4 style video clip) shows me the power of it:

Good stuff and great use of video, plus it helps if you’ve got a relative celebrity to do your voiceovers (yeah that bloke off the E4 ads who puts loads of sarcasm into everything). However it’s only had 266 views on Youtube.

The homepage of MyActionAid could be a bit better, they highlight upcoming events but it could do with showcasing more of the fundraising events that are upcoming. Overall though, a cracking social network for activists.

The campaigns section is titled ‘What you can do‘ – good stuff, if I saw the section ‘Campaigns’ I’d be bored stiff. This is engaging and a call to arms, it says ‘We are ActionAid, come join us’. Not ‘We are ActionAid, we campaign on this’. Again, it’s about engagement and people. I managed to end up clicking a big circle called ‘Take action now’ but when I did I was a bit disappointed to find a news story about a Labour minister giving his heart. The form to actually take action about this was below the scroll line, so I might not have bothered to look. If there’s a form, put it high up or at least have a big link to it.

There’s good use of a blog for the campaign on targeting poverty, charity blogs can sometimes be a bit weak but the brilliant PR stunt of applying to demolish St Paul’s cathedral in protest at mining projects in India makes for great material for a blog, especially as it gives the charity a chance to expand and add detail.

So to sum up:

• Great social network for activists, but frontpage could have more of a buzz about it and feature more of what the activists are doing to campaign, raise money etc
• Good use of blogging to support campaigns, helped by some creative PR
• Hiding away forms that encourage engagement below scroll lines is not good
• Good use of video to promote the social network, was good to watch and helped by star voiceover

He was interested in creating a more ‘community feel’ to their website. Everything we listed was ‘we want our own Facebook, but we don’t want it to be Facebook’. Fortunately, I had just the thing for him and something I’m trialing in my role at UCLan Students’ Union to create a series of networks for course representatives based around their school and faculty.

I pointed him in the direction of Ning. A fantastic tool that allows you to create your own social network – complete with forums, events, photos, video, groups. Best of all it’s open-source so you can code your own gadgets for it, and it allows your users to get involved. Ning is not there to ‘replace facebook’ or to be ‘the new facebook’, instead it takes the forum/messageboard concept and allows you create an interactive community around a specific subject. It reminds me of when everyone used to have a free Geocities website about their favourite band/sports team/famous person.

So, we’ll see if the New Generation Society take up a Ning for their site and bring their community of activists online. For small organisations, especially those with no budget and who want to bring together a network for people around a particular subject – Ning couldn’t be better.

*Note: I’m a graduate of the Common Purpose Frontrunner programme. It’s for young people who have shown leadership in civil society. Apprently I have done so.